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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

This comment and everything downstream from it are a distraction from their point: Run their query from your machine or from Tor and you'll see the same results in Google and lack of results in DDG.

Another example is a query for "elm dict". DDG has little idea what you're looking for while Google links you directly to the docs of Elm's Dict data-structure.

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> DDG has little idea what you're looking for while Google links you directly to the docs of Elm's Dict data-structure.

You know you're looking for a data structure, right? Add structure to your query, and DDG will do fine. Easy fix.

The opposite case, when google thinks he knows what you're asking but it's wrong, is impossible to fix.

I don't want them to be smart, I want them to be predictable and search what I say, not trying to reinterpret the query.

Thanks for the "elm dict" example. That's a really good one which actually does highlight practical differences between Google and DDG when I just tried it myself.

Most of the time I see comments like this, people don't provide hard examples of queries they found unsatisfying with one search engine compared to another.

See, my experience is quite the opposite when it comes to programming documentation. Whether it's StackOverflow or Django/Python docs, DDG seems to always get me there faster. I switch to Google for absurdly specific errors because it's database is simply bigger, but every time I have to spend a few minutes throwing quotation marks around parts of the query to get Google to actually find anything useful.

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